Japanese Café and Bar Hi Collar Moving Into the Old Rai Rai Ken Space

The traditional coffee scene in Japan has diversified and come into its own in the last dozen years or so, and now a café with an arsenal of gadgets and a menu of “’unique’ Japanese-style coffee and espresso drinks” is coming to — you probably guessed — the East Village. Bon Yagi, the entrepreneur who built New York’s so-called “Little Tokyo,” tells the Local East Village that Hi Collar will be a café by day and a bar at night when it opens in the old Rai Rai Ken space on East 10th Street in “about a month and a half.” [Local EV/NYT, Earlier]